


where the evening splits in half

by ironoxide



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Prohibition Era, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 06:45:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8317852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironoxide/pseuds/ironoxide
Summary: 1924. it's six years since elliot hauled himself back from france in pieces. he meets tyrell in a speakeasy. shit goes down.(title subject to change. also i suck at descriptions)





	

You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet  
lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because  
          it’s all I have,  
because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your  
slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this  
          bullet inside me  
’cause I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth. Don’t you see, it’s like  
I’ve swallowed your house keys, and it feels so natural, like the bullet was already there,  
          like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time. [...]  
Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home now?  
There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet  
          staring up at us like we’re something interesting.  
This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,  
and make a wish.  
—  _Wishbone_ , Richard Siken

 

Darlene gets a job at Whiterose’s, and then suddenly she stops coming by Elliot’s place so often, and it’s funny how quiet things get when she’s not around, and it’s funnier how quick he just fucking forgot how loud she could be. For a week after she starts the job Elliot is thinking to himself that maybe he’ll be able to get a solid six hours of sleep for once in his goddamn life without Darlene shaking him awake, maybe he’ll be able to sit down and read that book he borrowed from the library and has no intention of returning, maybe maybe maybe. But it’s like there’s a seven-day limit on the novelty of being alone, and then he remembers that before Darlene came by every night he was alone anyway, and before she started shaking him awake he’d wake himself up panting and sweating and shaking right down to his marrow, and he feels like shit again.

Night eight, he’s lying on his back looking at the water damage on the ceiling from the annual October leak and touching around the irregular white patch of skin on his stomach where he doesn’t feel things any more. The nerve endings are dead or something, or that’s what they told him. He wasn’t really listening. You get into one of those field hospitals, you get pumped full of all sorts of shit and things just kind of pass you by, like you’re not real, like you’re transparent. He remembers the guy in the bed opposite more clearly than he remembers anything the doctor said to him. Anyway: the nerve endings are dead, and he doesn’t like touching that spot, doesn’t like feeling that disconnect: _I am touching a part of myself, and I can only half-feel it._

It’s been eight nights of this, eight nights of doing nothing. The stain on the ceiling looks kind of like an exclamation point. If he closes his eyes, the shape is burned into the back of his eyelids in reverse.

And his apartment is a shitshow. The bathtub is flaked with something crusty he used to scratch off with his fingernails but now it’s become kind of a permanent fixture. That’s not to say he likes it, but like everything else it’s something he lives with, like the cockroaches, like the damp, like the pervasive chill that comes in through the broken window with the wind, only it doesn’t leave when the wind leaves. There’s a stove in the kitchen but he doesn’t use it except to warm the place up when winter hits like a ton of bricks. His bed is a mattress on the floor, pushed up into the corner of the room. Last week he found a dead rat by the door. The guy in the place next to his must have been over in France too, because he yells a lot, at people who aren’t in the room. Elliot saw him once on his way inside, sitting on the bottom step of the staircase and just staring. He waved a hand in front of the guy’s face, like an asshole, and he didn’t even blink.

When he decides to go to Whiterose’s, it’s because he’s staring so intently at the exclamation point on the ceiling that he doesn’t notice the roach until it’s crawled up over his mattress, his leg, and onto his arm. He bats it away and watches it lying on its back for a second or two, before it rights itself and walks away.

 

Darlene says: “I would have invited you if I knew you liked these places.” She’s got more eyeshadow under her eyes than she has on her lids – a lot of women wear it like that these days, and Elliot doesn’t know enough about makeup to say if it looks good on them, but it suits Darlene at least – and she’s wiping a glass with a rag, and it’s like she can’t quite believe she’s talking to him here, of all places. Her eyebrows are hitched up so high she looks like she just got slapped and she’s reeling from it.

“I don’t,” Elliot tells her. He’s been to speakeasies before, with Angela, but that was before. Places like this, they get full, they get loud; people touch him by accident and then touch him again on purpose to say sorry. But Whiterose’s is weird. It’s quiet. There’s something about it that’s similar to every other speakeasy around here – low-hanging lights, dark wood, something stifling about the air – but it’s edging closer to ten p.m. and Elliot can see three free tables, and he could walk in a straight line from the bar to the door without colliding with a single person on the way. Everybody knows Whiterose’s. It shouldn’t be this empty.

Darlene made him a gin and tonic and he hates the taste of it because it’s like he’s drinking someone’s perfume, but he’s drinking it anyway. She always makes things too strong; too much gin, not enough tonic. He wants to fish out the slice of lemon but his mother’s voice tells him _don’t play with your food_ , so he just sips, and licks the citrus sting off of his top lip. 

“Come _on_ , Elliot.” Darlene’s eyebrows are still arched high. “Admit you’re having fun. It won’t kill you.” Before he can say that actually, no, he’s not really having all that much fun, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because there are worse things to be doing on a Saturday night in New York City like lying on a mattress on the floor and letting roaches crawl all over him – before he can say any of that, she’s telling him to hold on, ’cause there’s a guy down there who’s been waiting for a few minutes now and if she doesn’t serve him he’s probably gonna smash his empty glass on the bartop and stab her with the pointy bits.

Elliot scrunches up his face and finishes his drink, and looks down into the glass at the smashed lemon rind on ice, and thinks about the loose, watery exclamation point on the ceiling of his apartment, and the cockroach lying on its back, legs kicking, and how easy it would have been to stand on it.

“Something interesting in there?” First there’s that, a man’s voice, cutting into him like a bayonet, and then there’s the smell of cologne, and then the bristle of someone leaning close, into his space. Fuck, he hates it when people do that. He read somewhere that people who get into someone else’s space do it because they like to make people feel uncomfortable. Like it’s some kind of power play.

“Uh.” Elliot says that and then he’s not sure how to qualify it. He wants to look up but there’s an innate understanding that if he does, their faces will be uncomfortably close. “No. Just an empty glass.”

“Oh, but that’s interesting.” There’s a smile in his voice: Elliot can hear it in the way his words sound pinched, but then at the same time lazy, luxurious. Something hard to place, too. He’s not from around here. “I didn’t think anybody in a place like this would have an empty glass for long enough to be staring at it. Lamenting, maybe, over the emptiness.”

Elliot says, “Not so much lamenting. Maybe I’m contemplating. People come to places like this to contemplate all the time.”

“If that’s the case, then pardon my interruption, and I’ll let you get back to it.” The closeness retreats, leonine in its slowness. Elliot turns his head a little. The other voice belongs to a man, taller than Elliot by a few inches, in a dark blue suit; straight nose, brown hair pushed back from his forehead, and clear blue eyes. There are blue eyes – blue-green or blue-grey or blue-in-the-right-light – and then there are _blue eyes_. His are the latter. He continues: “And if it’s not, I’ll get you another drink, so you don’t look out of place.”

“That’s thoughtful of you,” Elliot says instead of _no thanks_ or _I’m okay_ or _I don’t want another drink_. There’s something piercing about the way he’s being looked at that makes all those polite refusals crawl back down his throat.

“I’m glad you think so.” The blue of his eyes catches the light when he glances down at Elliot’s empty glass again. “Gin and tonic?”

Elliot isn’t sure he could stand another one. He says, “What are you drinking?” He doesn’t know enough about alcohol to order something off the top of his head that isn’t straight whiskey.

“A Sidecar.” Beat. “Cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice.”

It sounds stiff. “I’ll have one of those.”

“Adventurous.” He laughs. There’s a tinkling lilt to it. “Alright, two Sidecars it is.” The way he says _cars_ , with a soft emphasis on the _s_ , makes him sound European. Elliot puts his elbows on the bartop and waits.

The cocktail comes in a glass with a sugared rim and a slice of orange on the side. It’s yellowish, closer to amber in the low light. Elliot pinches the glass by the stem and rolls it between finger and thumb. Darlene didn’t mix it – she’s at the other end of the bar – but it’ll probably still taste like it’s not meant for drinking. He says, “Suppose I should ask your name.”

“Mm.” He’s drinking, and he smiles a little into the glass. He holds a mouthful before he swallows. “You should.”

“Okay.” Asshole. Elliot lifts his own glass to take a sip. He was right – it’s sour more than anything else, even with the buffer of sugar and the comparative sweetness of the orange. Cointreau is triple sec, he thinks. Over in France, he remembers Delacroix going out to the nearby town and coming back with a bottle, and they’d passed it round like a secret, drinking it straight, too comforted by the warmth in the backs of their throats to care that it tasted like shit. “What’s your name?”

“Tyrell. Yours?”

“Elliot.”

“I’ve never met an Elliot before.”

“I’ve never met a Tyrell.”

“So this is new for both of us.”

“New drink, new experience. Exciting day.” It kind of is. Elliot’s surprised by himself, by how long he’s managed to stand here and pretend he knows what it’s like to function properly. Tomorrow he’ll look back at this and he won’t recognise himself. Some guy with his face and his voice walked into Whiterose’s and drank a gin and tonic out of a highball, and someone offered to buy him a drink, and then they talked. It beggars belief.

Tyrell says, “How do you like it? The drink, I mean.”

Elliot won’t order it again, put it that way. He decides as he’s taking another sip that once it’s finished he’ll make his excuses and walk back to his place. His fingertips are tingling. He doesn’t want to be drunk, but this is okay. Alcohol is a – what do they call it? – _social lubricant_. If he hadn’t had Darlene’s G &T mix (straight gin that at one point in its existence might have had a molecule or two come into contact with some tonic water) he wouldn’t be talking to anyone right now. “I like it fine.”

Tyrell smiles, like he knows Elliot is just saying that because he doesn’t want to admit he hates it. He puts down his glass and runs his fingertip around the rim of it, and then licks away the sugar. _Don’t play with your food_ , his mother would say. Elliot rubs the back of his neck and Tyrell says, “What were you contemplating?”

He looks over at the empty highball, the melting lumps of ice and that smashed lemon rind. “This place is emptier than I expected.”

“Yes, it is.” Tyrell slides the slice of orange off the side of his glass and bites into it, quiet while he’s chewing. He swallows, brushes his thumb along his bottom lip. “Rumours of law enforcement in the area, I think. I doubt there’s anything to worry about, but it always sends people scattering.”

“But not you.”

Tyrell lifts a shoulder and lets it drop. “This is the only place this side of the city that sells genuine Cointreau. I can’t imagine I’ll be able to say that for much longer. Bootlegging is much easier when it doesn’t involve international shipping, I’m told.”

“You came all the way here for Cointreau?” Elliot’s disbelief is palpable. Surely there are better things to drink. “Are you French?”

That laugh again. “No. No, I’m from Sweden.” Elliot should have seen that coming: there’s something almost oppressively Scandinavian about him. “But I know what you mean. It’s not my first choice. I like wine, but it’s a little thin on the ground, as you can imagine.”

“Maybe once the Cointreau’s out you should switch to something that won’t dry up on you.” Maybe he shouldn’t have come to America at all, come to think of it.

“Mm. Well, I have expensive tastes.” No shit. Tyrell turns his head away, takes something out of his pocket. Elliot leans around him and catches a glimpse of something circular, silver or at least silver-plated. A pocket watch. Tyrell looks at it for a moment, then snaps it closed and slides it away. He says, “It’s warm in here, no?”

Not really. Maybe Tyrell’s wearing too many layers. Elliot is just wearing an undershirt and a two-day-old off-white shirt tucked arbitrarily into his trousers; on the way here it was bitterly cold, and there was a biting chill coming in with the breeze. His skin is still faintly peppered with goosebumps. He opens his mouth to say so, and then Tyrell cuts over him: “I think I’ll go and stand outside, Elliot, I quite feel like I’m melting.” He skulls the rest of his drink like it’s water, clears his throat. “Coming?”

Is he missing something? “I’m not—”

“Are you going to finish that?” Tyrell taps the foot of Elliot’s glass. A second of silence. Elliot stares at him, waiting for his brain to catch up. Tyrell interjects with a hopeful, “No?” and this time there isn’t even a second; Tyrell hooks his fingers around it and picks it up. It takes him two gulps to finish it this time and when he’s done he coughs, blinks a few times like he’s trying to clear something out of his eyes. “Alright. Let’s go.”

“Wait, I don’t—” Tyrell curls his hand around the width of Elliot’s upper arm and pulls. He stumbles, almost trips over his own foot. Tyrell is stronger than he looks – or maybe it’s that the gin, the third of that Sidecar, it dulled him enough that he’s sluggish, slower than usual. “Hey, _wait_ —” Tyrell shifts his grip, right hand moving to Elliot’s right arm, left hand on his left shoulder. He’s steering Elliot towards the back door; it opens out onto a corridor, damp and unlit, which ends abruptly to the right and stretches out into the darkness to the left. Tyrell pushes Elliot leftwards, and Elliot’s thinking that it’s just his luck, that his first excursion outside for a month or so is going to end like this. Maybe Tyrell’s going to rob him, hold him for ransom – that’d be a dead end, because Elliot doesn’t know anyone who’d be able to shell out ransom money, except maybe Angela, but she wouldn’t want to. Maybe he’s just going to kill him – and that’d be something like irony. Elliot went to war expecting to die in the dirt and the stench of it, and then he didn’t, and now he’s going to die like this, pathetic and incapable of defending himself, with the taste of Cointreau and lemon juice in the back of his throat.

The corridor ends at a door, and Tyrell leans around it to shove it open with his shoulder, and then they’re outside. It’s still just as cold as it was before, maybe even a few degrees colder. The only points of warmth on Elliot’s body are the hands on his arm and his shoulder. Tyrell says, “I’m sorry I had to do that, but I needed to get you outside.” The pressure of his grip loosens, and then it’s gone.

“What the _fuck_?” Elliot skitters a few steps away and turns around to look at him. He’s walked himself right into the corner of the alley. Tactically, a shitty move. A stupid move. Elliot’s not incapable of defending himself, but if Tyrell’s stronger than he looks, then he’s probably a better fighter than he looks, too. Elliot is a straight line of tension. “What the _fuck_ is your—”

“Look.” Tyrell’s hand goes into his pocket and Elliot’s eyes shift to the end of the alleyway. If he runs, now, while Tyrell’s looking down, he could— “Elliot, look.” Tyrell is holding out a leather wallet. He flips it open, and the moonlight refracts for a second off the metal badge set into the fabric.

“You’re a cop.” It comes out on a single breath. His mouth is hanging open. He shuts it.

“Right now, my colleagues are raiding the bar back there. They’re making arrests. I had to get you out.”

A dirty cop, then? Is that better or worse? He can’t tell. What the fuck does Tyrell expect from him in return? Darlene’s only had this job for a week. Is she going to be arrested too? He wishes he hadn’t finished that gin and tonic; maybe then he’d have been able to think more clearly. All he can force out is, “Why?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Why the hell would I—”

“Elliot Alderson, twenty-eight years old, born 17th September 1896, to Edward, now deceased, and Magda Alderson. One younger half-sister, Darlene. Honourably discharged after being wounded in action in France in 1918. Currently unemployed, living in a third-floor apartment in Queens.” A pause. “Am I right?”

From the open door they came through, Elliot hears the clattering of smashing glass, a torrent of it, a downpour, distant but still piercing. There’s a sensation like when you’re lying in bed, just about to drift off, and then suddenly you jerk awake because your brain tells you that you’re falling. He could have been at home right now. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. This is why he doesn’t drink. He can’t think properly, can’t form coherent thoughts. He’s thinking: _Need to get out. Need to go somewhere. Is apartment safe? Darlene can’t go to jail. Tyrell knows me. How?_

He says: “Yeah. You’re right.”

“Okay.” Tyrell still has his badge out, and his other hand too: open, palm facing out, fingers together, the international symbol for _stop_. Slowly, like he’s trying not to disturb something that’s sleeping with his movements, he puts his badge back in his pocket, and lowers his other hand too. “I want to offer you a job.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *establishes myself as the prime contributor of tyrelliot aus on this hellsite*
> 
> also i dont know shit about nothing but i especially dont know shit about new york city so if i mess up somewhere please tell me (here or on [tumblr](http://griffinmcelboy.tumblr.com/))


End file.
